The Modern Customer Podcast

The Modern Customer Podcast is a show exploring the intersection of customer experience, social customer service and content. We will also dive into related leadership topics. The show is hosted by Forbes contributor and customer experience strategist Blake Morgan and features guests that include practitioners, authors, influencers and other tastemakers.

If you haven’t noticed GoDaddy has gone through a transformation in the last few years. GoDaddy leadership talk candidly about how their prior brand strategy generated a lot of attention but alienated a lot of their customers. GoDaddy realized most of its customers were actually female small business owners. GoDaddy’s new CEO Blake Irving has worked hard to shift its strategy to “represent them [women] proudly.” Today GoDaddy has many strong female leaders running the company including Barb Rechterman, Chief Customer Officer. GoDaddy has become a more customer-centric company. I know because I personally am a customer. Now when you call their call center a voice says “need customer support? We love helping customers.” Chief Customer Officer Barb has been instrumental in overhauling GoDaddy’s customer experience. Barb is not just a customer advocate she’s also a dynamic person outside of work who rides Harley motorcycles and trains her horses in her spare time.

Did you know that Chief Customer Officers are the human duct tape of the organization? Chief Customer Officers are one of the fastest growing roles within organizations today. The Chief Customer Officer reports to the CEO and is responsible for the end to end customer experience. While the Chief Customer Officer is a highly influential role within the company, you don't have to be a C-level officer within the company to impact change around the customer experience. But you do need to understand how to be a strong relationship builder, according to Jeanne Bliss. If you're trying to build influence at your company how do you go about getting meetings with people such as the CFO--and why would you want to do that at all? Bliss has some ideas around how you can do this well.

Bliss is an author, speaker and consultant. She's recently published Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How To Build Your Customer Driven Growth Engine (Wiley). Bliss has real-world experience having held senior customer strategy roles at Lands’ End, Microsoft, Mazda, Coldwell Banker and Allstate Corporation. She is the President of consulting firm Customer Bliss, she’s the author of two other books including her first Chief Customer Officer (Josey-Bass) and I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty In Good Times and Bad (Penguin Group). She’s an experienced practitioner and thought leader who doesn’t sugar coat the facts.

Why don’t more companies understand if they get the “right” things “right” with customer experience success will come? Making money is not the goal but it’s the result when the company keeps the customer in mind. All companies today are in a foot race. Unless the company is obsessively trying to make the customer happy, the company risks losing.

My latest podcast guest is Augie Ray, Director of VOC Customer Experience Action for a Fortune 100 financial services company. Augie writes frequently about customer experience. He recently wrote a post (that we discuss in this podcast) about how too many companies treat customer experience as a program and not a purpose--something to be assigned to a couple of employees while the rest of the company goes about its business improving efficiency, acquisition and margins. Augie--citing Forrester--says only 25% of CX professionals say their companies’ customer experience programs actually improve customer experience. He also shares a study indicating that 81% of organizations have seen their Customer Experience Management (CXM) initiatives fail in the last three years.

Augie Ray doesn’t believe everyone in the company is a marketer, nor are they a salesperson. But he does believe everyone in the company should be focused on customer experience. Companies like Uber and Nest understand the power of customer experience and are reaping the benefits. In this podcast not only do we talk about customer experience case studies, we also take a deep dive into a discussion of ROI.

Leaders often want to know of the ROI of a customer experience program. But what is the ROI of doing nothing? Even if you do nothing for the customer experience it will still cost you. There is an impact to not fixing what is broken about your customer experience. Examples of the negative ROI of doing nothing include loss of market share, the cost of ceasing to innovate, and the risk of not differentiating yourself from the competition. Short-sighted management and quarterly demands of "the street" are getting in the way of a clear vision--and hurting customer experience. In this podcast we talk about social customer care, why most companies are still struggling with call volume (and make it the customer's problem) and other major customer service fails.

Fragmented customer experiences have made it challenging for customer experience professionals looking to leverage big data. Have you ever bought a pair of shoes online and then it follows you for a few months? This is the challenge with personalization today. Personalization hasn’t delivered relevance and hasn’t given us a different approach. What’s supposed to be personalized is still mass marketing; and with that mass customer experiences. According to Lisa Arthur, CMO of Teradata Applications personalization is not making the cut. Social media has forever changed the customer-company relationship. Many companies today lack a customer experience strategy. Companies today need to tear down siloes and untangle that data hairball—for the sake of customer experience. That means departments working collaboratively with their sister organizations—consolidating different data pieces. Customer service will need IT, and the rest of the company. In this podcast we not only address the plight of modern day customer service but we also talk about how recent data breaches (think Ashley Madison) have changed attitudes about privacy.

It has been said that women do not support each other in the workplace because they are competing for a few positions at the top. While this might all just be in women's heads, in reality in sports inequality happens every day. The Ironman championship is another venue where inequality happens every year. There are an unequal number of opportunities for women and men in the Ironman championship.

Women are told to #leanin in business but if our sports organizations still create unequal opportunities for women isn't that sending mixed messages? As a society do we truly believe men and women should have equal opportunities?

My guest on this week’s Modern Customer podcast is Ironman champion Sara Gross. Not only is Sara an Ironman champion but she also has a PhD- she completed her dissertation was about women's history. Today we talk about what the Ironman can teach us about leadership development and equality for women competing in sports.

In this podcast Sara and I talk about mental toughness and what it takes for women to not only be successful in sports, but also in their careers. Sara and I talk about confidence, the benefits of how “nobody really cares,” and how to start investing in yourself.